Subtitling

Subtitling is the practice of presenting timed text alongside video. Subtitles assume the viewer can hear and render dialogue; captions assume they cannot and include speaker identification and relevant non-speech sound. The most common interchange format, SubRip (.srt), is plain text: an index, a start and end timecode, and one or more lines.

The craft is more constrained than prose writing, and the constraints are why it looks wrong to a copy editor. Reading speed governs everything — roughly 15 to 20 characters per second — so text is condensed rather than transcribed. Lines are broken at syntactic boundaries so each fragment parses on its own. A caption stays on screen long enough to read and clears before it competes with the next.

Punctuation follows from the same pressure. Commas are frequently omitted deliberately, because a subtitle is presented in short timed units and the segmentation is already doing the work a comma would do in continuous prose. Adding them can be a genuine improvement or can be applying prose conventions to a medium that does not want them — a distinction worth checking before correcting anyone's work.

Because a subtitle file is plain text with stable indices, a change log keyed to timecode is the natural review artifact: reviewable, sortable, and precise about what changed.